Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Found an unironic AI bro in the wild on Bluesky:
You want my unsolicited thoughts on the line between man and machine, I feel this bubble has done more to clarify that line then to blur it, both by showcasing the flaws and limitations inherent to artificial intelligence, and by highlighting the aspects of human minds which cannot be replicated.
I'm not comfortable saying that consciousness and subjectivity can't in principle be created in a computer, but I think one element of what this whole debate exposes is that we have basically no idea what actions makes consciousness happen or how to define and identify that happening. Chatbots have always challenged the Turing test because they showcase how much we tend to project consciousness into anything that vaguely looks like it (interesting parallel to ancient mythologies explaining the whole world through stories about magic people). The current state of the art still fails at basic coherence over shockingly small amounts of time and complexity, and even when it holds together it shows a complete lack of context and comprehension. It's clear that complete-the-sentence style pattern recognition and reproduction can be done impressively well in a computer and that it can get you farther than I would have thought in language processing, at least imitatively. But it's equally clear that there's something more there and just scaling up your pattern-maximizer isn't going to replicate it.